


The Blurry Line Between Dreams and Reality

by muggle95



Series: Muggle's HP Fics [9]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Book 3: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Flashbacks, Gen, Light Angst, One-Shot, bad memories, dementor-induced flashbacks, dementors are their own warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-30
Updated: 2020-08-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:07:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26200891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/muggle95/pseuds/muggle95
Summary: Remus wakes up to a dementor on the train to Hogwarts. It's rather disorienting
Series: Muggle's HP Fics [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1901860
Kudos: 4





	The Blurry Line Between Dreams and Reality

Cold. The cold was the first thing Remus' sleep-addled mind was certain wasn't a dream. The rest was harder to tell, a forgotten dream that had twisted into something he wasn't sure was more memory or nightmare: the lingering ache of a transformation, made worse by Scotland's miserably cold winters. The pain and terror of his first moon as a child. Sirius' cruel, mocking laugh. Peter's sobbing mother being presented with a medal her son could never wear. The crushing despair of that most miserable November first, when the world celebrated but Remus could only mourn the sudden loss of all his friends, each now dead or turned traitor... And even as he shook himself awake, he could clearly see James' lifeless body, crumpled on the floor. It was new for his imagination to be quite that cruel.

But cold and despair, that combination meant dementor. He forced his thoughts into some semblance of order, enough to remember the patronus charm. Even as tainted as the memories were by pain, he still had his best friends’ faces swimming in his mind's eye. And that affection, the joy of acceptance, was still there, and it was enough to produce a silvery shield, though not his deeply ironic wolf. It was enough to chase the dementor out of the door to his compartment. The dementor swooped away in its horrible fashion, taking with it the bulk of the despair and the cold.

It did not take with it the spitting image of James collapsed on the floor of the compartment. Remus pulled out some chocolate - he'd stocked up, knowing that dementors would be at the school but they shouldn't be on the _train_ \- snapped off a piece for himself, and offered squares around to the terrified young faces around him. Students. _His_ students, soon.

Merlin, that still took some getting used to. He was a professor.

And it wasn't James on the floor; that face was much too young. It was another child the same age as the ones that had nervously accepted chocolate from him. His glasses were the wrong shape too. And Remus suspected that behind those glasses were not hazel eyes, but instead ones that were famously green.

This must be Harry.

Remus had known, intellectually, that Harry was old enough to be a Hogwarts student, but seeing him in person was different. It made something deep in his chest ache with the knowledge that he was an absolute stranger to James’ son. The ache of having lost all his friends hadn't quite faded either, despite his patronus, but Remus had always been good at covering up his distress. Even this close to the moon, he would be professional and reliable, for the sake of the students present.

Besides, a little heartache was far easier to cover than the bone-deep weariness he always felt after a full moon. The moon had been the night before, and even under the influence of Wolfsbane, retaining his mind enough to curl up and sleep away the night, the transformation always left him exhausted. Admittedly, falling asleep mere minutes into his intended vigil on the train wasn't exactly hiding that exhaustion, but the students didn't need to know any of that. They needed an adult to reassure them, and that, Remus could be.

Absent the dementor's influence, Remus could see the gentle rise and fall of Harry's chest. He wasn't James. He wasn't dead. Remus just needed his emotions to catch up with his rational mind.

By the pained scrunch of Harry's face - returning swiftly towards consciousness, if Remus was any judge - it didn't seem the dementor had _kissed_ Harry, just affected him strongly. Thank goodness. Remus would never have forgiven himself if any student had come to harm under his watch, but if _Harry_ had suffered the Kiss right under Remus' delightfully useless human nose, he thought he might have resigned as soon as his carriage reached the gates of Hogwarts.

Merlin. He was on the train, in the compartment the Marauders had habitually shared, in case Sirius tried to come sneaking in via the train, _not_ in case of dementor attacks! He would be speaking to Dumbledore about his concerns, but he suspected the headmaster hadn't planned for this either. He hoped nothing had gone wrong in the dozens of other compartments full of students that _didn't_ contain a Defense professor, sleeping or otherwise. He hadn't meant to fall asleep, but there was nothing to be done for that now.

He stayed in the compartment long enough to see Harry awake, oriented, and eating chocolate, then made his excuses and left before he could make an ass of himself being too familiar with a student who he hadn't interacted with in almost twelve years; a student who didn't know him at all.

He had told the students he was going to talk to the conductor, which he still intended to, if he ever got there. After the door closed between him and the compartment with a painfully different Potter, he was able to think more clearly, and he decided his time was better spent checking on all the students between here and the conductor's cabin, and in checking that the dementors had truly left. He made his way up the aisle, even as the train jolted back into motion, and let himself bury his emotions under the routine of knocking on compartment doors, distributing chocolate, and assuring scared children that he was making sure the dementor was gone and that it wouldn't harm them.

The longer he was awake, the easier it was to remember he was thirty-five, not a teenager sharing a compartment with his best friends, nor a young adult who had just lost everything. He would meet Harry later, properly, without the vulnerability of a dementor's presence or being half asleep. Even if Dumbledore had only approached him for the job because Remus would be more alert to Sirius' tricks than anyone else alive, Remus was still here to be a teacher, and he was determined to do the job well.

**Author's Note:**

> August 31st 1993 was definitely a full moon


End file.
